Yale Law School Drops Out of a Ranking System That It Never Needed

The “successful conduct of business demands qualities quite other than those necessary for passing examinations.” – Ludwig von Mises

Policy writer and Duke Law School grad George Leef told me a story long ago about a friend who graduated from Harvard Law School, and who was partner level at a top New York City law firm. Leef asked the prominent attorne whom he would hire if given the choice between fifteen Harvard Law grads, and 15 individuals who had been accepted to Harvard Law, only to turn down the opportunity. The response he received is that it wouldn’t matter whom he hired. That all 30 received a fat acceptance letter was the only distinction that mattered to him.

Around the time that Leef told me the above story, the Wall Street Journal released its ranking of top U.S. graduate business schools. The University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business was ranked #1.

Where it gets interesting, comical, or both is that a number of Journal reporters were assigned to the ranking story only for one or more of them to contact employers known to hire Ross grads. The employers were asked why U of M’s business school produces such capable employees, only for the employers to babble on about how the Ross curriculum essentially shaped “future-focused,” “community minded,” “problem solving” employees. Oh, so that’s why it was #1….

Reading about the “best” U.S. business school, it was difficult to not feel sorry for the reporters assigned to a story that was so completely ridiculous. Without denigrating the undeniable good of college or graduate school for even a second, it’s hard to take seriously the notion that what’s learned in the classroom translates to the wider world. More realistically, what’s taught doesn’t much matter.

Think of John D. Rockefeller, who was arguably the richest man who ever lived. Among other things his wealth created the University of Chicago, along with crucial advances in the healthcare sphere. But Rockefeller hardly went to business school. Neither did Bill Gates, nor the late Steve Jobs. While anecdote tells us very little, the names previously mentioned are a reminder that businessmen are generally born as opposed to being taught.

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founder Fred Smith famously had his idea for an overnight delivery service ridiculed by a Yale professor, but a focus on a professor being clueless about a very real commercial future envisioned by Smith mostly misses the point. The reality is that a 99% majority of investors would have given Smith the “C” that his professor did. Which is the point.

The future of commerce is much more than opaque. Which means the future of work is incredibly difficult to fathom in a country like the U.S. Precisely because entrepreneurs like Smith, Gates, Jobs and Rockefeller are relentlessly changing how we do things and how our needs are met, there’s no realistic way for educators to prepare us for tomorrow. Really, what would they teach us in light of how entrepreneurs are consistently altering the terms of commerce?

The answer to the above question doesn’t insult professors, colleges, or graduate schools. At the same time, it’s an acknowledgement that colleges, universities and graduate schools are arming their students with dated information. We know this because the present in business is by definition the past. Put another way, the advanced goods and services that seemingly represent the frontier of goods and services will soon enough be rendered hopelessly dated. Yet we expect education to prepare us for what’s ahead? Did Rockefeller take petroleum engineering classes in his year at Chancellor University? Did the Wright brothers take aerodynamics while they attended college? Oh wait, they didn’t go to college. Which is the bigger point.

More important, hopefully it’s the point when trying to understand the meaning of college and graduate school rankings. It was for some reason “news” when the powers-that-be at Yale Law School dropped out of the U.S. News & World Report rankings due to “flawed methodology,” but it’s more realistic to say that Yale never needed such rankings. It didn’t nor does it because Yale is at or near the top for the only indicator that matters: difficulty of admission. Yale is hard to get into. End of story.

Yale is the premier law school for the same reason that Harvard can claim status as the premier business school. Both are incredibly difficult to get into. While rankings and methodology can unearth all manner of ratings, including U of M as the #1 business school, the simple truth is that a Harvard MBA candidate will have much greater access to the best employers, and this will remain true even if Harvard isn’t ranked at all.

What makes it elite is that far more of the world’s commercially ambitious want a Harvard MBA than they do the MBAs awarded by other schools. What’s true about Harvard is true for Yale Law. Very smart and very accomplished individuals go there. In other words, they’re already smart when they arrive on campus. This is what U.S. News perhaps doesn’t realize, and that Yale and Harvard are loathe to admit.